The Anti-Mandela Lobby

Nelson Mandela—South Africa’s first black president—died Thursday in Johannesburg at age 95. His passing has been mourned by millions across the world who consider Mandela an icon in the effort to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid policies. Although Mandela and his cause are almost universally lionized today, those policies were the topic of much controversy in the United States in the 1980s as Congress debated whether to impose sanctions on the South African government—which it ultimately did in 1986, in a bill that listed Mandela’s release from prison as a condition for lifting the sanctions.

What follows is an adapted excerpt from Operation Blackwash, New York Times reporter Ron Nixon’s recent ebook about Pretoria’s efforts to roll back those sanctions—improbably enlisting African Americans in an attempt to squelch anti-apartheid sentiment abroad. Of course, not only were sanctions passed, but apartheid ended in 1994, and Mandela, the freedom fighter, prisoner and peacemaker, was elected president.

On the morning of June 8, 1988, dozens of children from Washington, D.C., schools spread out across the well-manicured lawns of the U.S. Capitol. Holding hands, the students walked one by one into the domed building, marveling at the large rotunda inside and giggling as their voices echoed off the spacious walls.

But this was no ordinary field trip. The children weren’t there just for a civic lesson—they were also there to deliver a message. Each child carried a small black doll to deliver to the lawmakers. And each doll represented a child who would be harmed by the sanctions that Congress had imposed on South Africa two years earlier in protest of the country’s apartheid government.

The message behind the dolls—part of a lobbying campaign called “Operation Heartbreak”—was simple: Sanctions on South Africa would do more harm than good. “We are here in the interest of millions of suffering South African children who are already the poorest and most helpless and the most vulnerable in South Africa, [who will] be further harassed and suffer all the more with a further round of U.S. sanctions,” the organizer of the event said at the time.

His name was Rev. Kenneth Frazier, a former Methodist minister and failed congressional candidate, as well as the leader of the group behind Operation Heartbreak, which called itself the Wake Up America Coalition. Frazier—despite his opposition to a policy meant to weaken South Africa’s white-dominated segregationist government—was also black.

Operation Heartbreak and the Wake Up America Coalition would vanish as quickly as they had sprung up: Within weeks, the House of Representatives would pass a tougher sanctions act, and apartheid would finally be dismantled in 1994. But years later, the event would be revealed as part of an elaborate campaign aimed at turning an unlikely coalition of black Americans against further U.S. sanctions on South Africa. In part, that meant isolating African Americans from prominent African critics of apartheid, like Nelson Mandela. With plans hatched by government officials in Pretoria and aided by an army of lobbyists in Washington, apartheid defenders waged a relentless campaign for the hearts and minds of the black American community by appealing to the economic suffering of fellow blacks in South Africa—the very victims of apartheid.

The U.S. campaign was part of the apartheid-era government’s worldwide propaganda push to improve its image, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. Official estimates from the country’s Department of Information put annual spending on the campaign at about $100 million a year (in 1980s dollars), though the true amount might never be known. The lobbying effort targeting American blacks was not the largest, but it was one of the most significant, as Pretoria’s agents built up a network of proxies among black groups not just in the capital, but across the country—in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas.

In a stunning example of the Washington influence game at its cynical worst, the U.S. campaign would involve hundreds of people, from church leaders to black newspaper owners, from black businessmen to executives at multinational corporations. Some were willing participants who were paid handsomely for their services. Others, like the black children delivering dolls to members of Congress, played a part unknowingly. The campaign even involved many prominent civil rights leaders, some of whom had once fought alongside Martin Luther King Jr. against racism and segregation in the United States.

What follows are the stories of just a few of those individuals—who maintained complicated, and sometimes hidden, connections to Pretoria—and their failed efforts to turn African American opinion about Mandela’s cause on its head.